Photoblog Template Hacking
Although I have been pretty happy with my photoblog project:
The Bridge Project, I have been hankering for the classic one picture at a time format that seems to dominate the genre. And rather then spend hours and hours a night, which could be put to better use in sleeping, I decided to cave and find myself a template to
steal borrow.
Of course, even though thousands of people use Blogger, even though Blogger has partnered with Hello/Picasa to provide a simple to use uploading tool and free image hosting, and even though Blogger encourages you to photoblog with Blogger, there are no templates that even closely approximate the one picture per page format so common to MT photoblogs.
Only Gwen, it seems, has even attempted to consider this task, and her results were unsatisfactory for my needs.
So, as you might imagine, I wasted many a good hour which I really really should have spent sleeping (Blogging from work? Only on 2 hours sleep does this seem like a good idea.) hacking the TicTac template from Blogger. The result:
TicTac Photoblog Template.
I think you would be better off stepping through the CSS and just downloading and hosting the graphics from your own webspace, as the current host is a little temperamental. Not all graphics load all the time, which is very frustrating. And speaking of CSS, I have no idea how any of that crap works, so that part of the code is really hacked to bits. I deleted a bunch of stuff but left the CSS that formatted said deleted stuff in because I couldn't figure out all the references (and maybe because it was 4am at the time).
But anyway, it seems to work just fine. Have not cross tested it in various other browsers, and I don't intend to.
How do you use the template?
1) Cut and paste the code from the code page (see the previous link list on the right) and paste into your template file (edit as necessary to add links to the navigation horizontal rule in the top right).
2) In the blog settings, set it to 1 post per page.
3) In Hello, adjust the Settings so that the preview image is the largest available size.
4) Post one pic a day via Hello. You MUST include a caption if you want it to show up in the Previous listing. But keep it short.
Done! Instant kinda looking like an MT photoblog, only without any of the PHP crap.
Okay, so it sucks compared to an MT photoblog. And it isn't really very good on its own merits. It gets by well enough on it's own. Make your own Blogger photoblog template and then we'll talk.